Navigational Needs

Find Me

I’m listening to Lateralus on my iPod video. That’s right, tech from a decade ago still works well enough to play an album from 15 years ago.

This body holding me reminds me of my own mortality. Embrace this moment. Remember. We are eternal. All this pain is an illusion.

I found the iPod in an old box and scrounged up a “Dock Connector to USB Cable” to charge it. The iPod is a beautiful piece of work that more than holds its own against any contemporary Apple design. If Jony Ive is struck by a dizzying wave of nostalgia he should consider bringing back the great wheel of navigation. It’s too good, despite the dreadful clicks that should have been long ago banished to the deepest, darkest cell in the settings dungeon. Look at the wear – lit bright in chrome – honest proof of all the places we’ve been. I’ll take black on black with white accents over gold, rose or otherwise, all day every day.

I’ve been using Apple Music the last few months. Consider my despair when I asked Siri to play Tool and she responded by laughing in my face. Watch my fruitless search for any digital version to buy. See me fail to unearth the music backup that has to be somewhere on one of the dozen drives sitting around the house. Don’t even ask about the CDs (round and holey with shiny backsides) I bought at Wooden Nickel Music (hometown shop, collect enough nickels and you can trade them in for a discount on a CD of your choice).

Gaze upon my pure, unadulterated joy at finding all the Tool albums I crave. They’re all just a few spins of the wheel away.

The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

– Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy

This is a classic that I should have read before now. It took me a while, both to actually start reading the book and to finish it once I had begun, and it was well worth it.

The book’s premise should be familiar to almost everyone. Count Dracula is a vampire. He terrorizes people. The people try to kill him. Van Helsing is involved. Vampires don’t like the light. Or garlic. Or crosses. They can’t get inside a home unless invited.

You get the picture.

I probably put off reading the book for so long because I’m irrationally wary of stilted, “old” language. The book didn’t deliver on that front, and was actually quite easy and enjoyable to read. One of my favorite passages:

The tomb in the daytime, and when wreathed with fresh flowers, had looked grim and gruesome enough, but now, some days afterwards, when the flowers hung lank and dead, their whites turning to rust and their greens to browns, when the spider and the beetle had resumed their accustomed dominance, when the time-discolored stone and dust-encrusted mortar and rusty, dank iron, and tarnished brass, and clouded silver-plating gave back the feeble glimmer of a candle, the effect was more miserable and sordid than could have been imagined. It conveyed irresistibly the idea that life, animal life, was not the only thing that could pass away.

I think the most enjoyment I found in the book came from all the wonderful vampire lore that ended up in more modern books. I love knowing that Stoker was breaking new ground with his ideas. And we’ve been using them ever since.

Explanation/excuse: Cassandra and I went to see Doctor Who on the big screen for her birthday. My failure at planning well means I didn’t have time to write the end of The Runner like I should have. Also see: Suspense building as an excusatory out.

I am not afraid of heights. I’ve always had a hard time understanding what skeeves people out about being up high, or seeing things from a tall perspective. Sometimes I take my ability to deal with heights to the next level and think about what it would be like to be a mountain climber. Meru proved to me that I probably don’t have what it takes.

The film follows Conrad Anker, Jimmy Chin and Renan Ozturk as they attempt to be the first to reach the Shark’s Fin peak of Meru, a 21,850-foot mountain in the Gharwal Himalayas of India. It’s not the tallest mountain in the world by a long shot, but the Shark Fin is one of the most difficult peaks to summit.

The first part of the film covers their first attempt in 2008. A storm kept them off the top of the mountain, and they decided to go back again years later. A series of accidents before the second attempt even started almost derailed the entire thing. I don’t want to give away too many details to ruin the story so I’ll just say that it’s amazing they even made a second attempt after what happened.

The most wonderful part of the movie was its discussion of death and the risks these climbers take. They are out there in some of the harshest and most unforgiving places in the world — day in and day out. And they love it. There was no shying away from reality during the interview scenes of the documentary: They knew death was always just above the next handhold and they embraced it.

It takes a special kind of person to climb mountains, so I think I’ll just continue to enjoy from afar. The stunning imagery and bravery on display vie for a spot in the place I keep my favorites, but in the end I think the terrible and wondrous hubris of the human race wins out.

Meru rates 8 out of 10 stars. You can see it in theaters now. If you don’t share a love of heights with me you might have to suffer through sweaty palms throughout (I’ve heard that’s a thing that happens to you other types). It will be well worth it.